9 out of 10 of us could die from a blackout

Bill Straub writes at PJ Media that

A report has found that up to nine out of 10 Americans could die from a long-term blackout as a result of starvation and societal collapse.

...Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a congressional advisory board working to protect the U.S. from EMP and other threats, said that in addition to destroying the grid, an event could “collapse all the other critical infrastructures — communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water — necessary to sustain modern society and the lives of 310 million Americans.”

...The nation should undertake several initiatives, Baker said. A national executive agency should be created within either the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Defense with the first order of business being the development of a national EMP/GMD protection plan and a set of national planning scenarios.

Baker said the nation also needs to create a national program to protect the electric power grid, including essential supporting infrastructures used for fuel supply and communication.

And Congress should establish an independent commission solely focused on electric grid reliability with the authority to issue and enforce regulations similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Baker told the panel that the lack of progress in protecting critical infrastructure from EMP and GMD centers on the fact that responsibility is distributed.

“EMP protection has become a finger-pointing, ring-around-the-rosey, duck-and-cover game,” he said. “Our bureaucracy has enabled gaps for addressing the difficult problems of EMP and GMD, resulting in no substantive action to protect the nation.”

The U.S. faces the “classic Washington problem of issues that span departments or fall between departments, which we’re all very familiar with, but then we add to that the involvement of the private sector, without central leadership, we’re foundering.”

In response to the situation, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) has introduced the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which, among other things requires the Department of Homeland Security to include EMP threats in its national planning scenarios and conduct a campaign to proactively educate owners and operators of critical infrastructure, emergency planners, and emergency responders at all levels of government of EMP threats.

Read more here.